Brutal Conflict in Sudan Brings Warnings by Bush and Annan

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: April 8, 2004

A conflict raging in Sudan came under heightened international scrutiny yesterday as President Bush called on the government there to rein in militias and the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, raised the alarm about reported atrocities.

The timing of Mr. Annan's comments made them particularly pointed. Ten years ago, when Mr. Annan was the United Nations' peacekeeping chief, ethnic Hutu combatants killed up to 800,000 ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Rwanda. The massacres have come to symbolize the world's failure to avert mass killings of shocking proportions.

Yesterday, Mr. Annan used a commemoration of the 1994 events to draw attention to the western Darfur region of Sudan, where the country's latest civil war has pushed an estimated 100,000 civilians west across the desert border into Chad.

The refugees, who are black Africans, have reported attacks by largely Arab militias affiliated with the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum.

There are no accounts of what is happening in Darfur from independent observers; the Khartoum government has refused aid groups access to much of the region. But refugees in Chad have told of being chased out of their villages, and have reported killings and rapes.

''Such reports leave me with a deep sense of foreboding,'' Mr. Annan said at yesterday's commemoration, held in Geneva. ''Whatever terms it uses to describe the situation, the international community cannot stand idle.''

President Bush, who has tried to bring an end to a separate civil war in Sudan, called on the Sudanese government to end the attacks in Darfur.

''The Sudanese government must immediately stop local militias from committing atrocities against the local population and must provide unrestricted access to humanitarian aid agencies,'' Mr. Bush said in a written statement. ''The government of Sudan must not remain complicit in the brutalization of Darfur.''

The other war in Sudan, which has pit Muslim Khartoum against southern Christian rebels for nearly 20 years, is beginning to show signs of a thaw.

Peace talks between the Islamist government in the north and the Sudan People's Liberation Army, from the largely Christian and animist south, have steadily inched forward. A final accord is likely to bring the deployment of a substantial United Nations peacekeeping force in Sudan.